My colleague Tim Carney’s latest column uses the current controversies over government surveillance as a jumping-off point to make the case for the importance of protecting privacy. You should read his column, as always, but I’d like to take issue with his concluding paragraph.

Carney starts off with a 2009 quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” After making the case for privacy rights, Carney concludes: “If Presidents Obama and Bush have something they don’t want people to know, as Obama’s pal Schmidt puts it, maybe they shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”